Damien Leone’s third Terrifier film is the most capably made of the three and the longest-feeling. David Howard Thornton’s silent Santa is a small marvel of malice and timing; nearly everything around him is padding, and there are 125 minutes of it.
Damien Leone has now written, directed and edited three films about Art the Clown, a killer in greasepaint who has never said a word on screen and has never needed one. Terrifier 3 moves him to Christmas, puts him in a Father Christmas suit and points him at people doing their shopping, while Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), who fought him last time and lived, tries to get through the holiday in one piece. It is the most capably made of the three, and it has the most in it that could have gone. It opened in UK cinemas on 11 October 2024 with an 18 certificate and runs 125 minutes.
What Leone does well he now does better. The gore is practical, latex and stage blood rather than computers, shot in full light and held well past the point where most directors would cut away. George Steuber lights the homes in the orange of fairy lights and shop windows and the killings in something flatter and whiter, so you can usually tell from the colour of a room what is about to happen in it. Olga Turka does both costume and production design, which is unusual, and here it pays: the Santa suit is grubby and a size too small, and the rooms Art walks into are dressed with the cards and tinsel of people who expected to see January.
David Howard Thornton is the reason to go, if you are going. He plays Art as a silent-film comedian who has wandered into the wrong picture: he mugs, he bows, he waits for applause, he does a small pleased shimmy when a plan comes off. Every killing is a routine and he times it like one, with a pause before the last beat so that we know it is coming. We should own what we felt. During the first set piece, which arrives early and in somebody’s front room, we watched with a hand half across our face, then heard ourselves laugh at the pause, then felt bad about laughing. That is the film working as intended, and we did not enjoy admitting it. Clint Howard turns up as a man called Smokey and does what Clint Howard does.
The trouble is everything between the set pieces. Leone wants this to be Sienna’s story as much as Art’s, and LaVera works hard, playing a woman trying to seem well for the people around her and not managing it. But the scenes given to her and to her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) are written like a television drama about recovery, long and earnest and full of people asking how she is. Samantha Scaffidi returns as Victoria Heyes from the first film, and with her comes the series’ growing back-story about what Art is and where he comes from, which the film hints at, hints at again, and leaves for next time. We were bored in these stretches, and then annoyed, because the film knows what it is for and keeps stopping to be something else.
Leone edits his own films, and this is where it shows. Every director needs someone in the cutting room who will say that a scene is over, and there is nobody here to say it. Paul Wiley’s score pulls two ways, low drones under Art and strings under Sienna, and the film cuts between them without finding a way to make them meet. The credits list Leone as writer, director and editor.
Most critics have been warmer than we are about the mix of story and slaughter. We think the story is the drag, and that the slaughter on its own would have made a leaner film; the parts worth keeping would fit into ninety minutes. The slasher has always been a short form. Halloween (1978) did its work in an hour and a half and left. Leone has twice decided otherwise, and Terrifier 2 (2022) was longer still than this one.
If the name Art the Clown means nothing to you, this is not the place to start; it assumes you know who everyone is and why Victoria has come back. If it does mean something, you have already decided. Go with someone who laughs at the wrong moments, sit near the aisle, and do not eat first. It carries an 18 and has earned every point of it.
